Making Luck
It takes a community
We’ve been in full sprint at our Habitat operation since the ball dropped on 2026. Despite winter throwing all it can at us this year, we continued to make progress on current and future building projects.
Our first Rural Starter Home is now ready for a family. Below is a beautiful video shot for us by local professionals who donated their work to support this project. Our community continues to be generous in their gifts. People — the beautiful, contradictory, diverse spectrum of humanity — provide the heart and soul and sweat and funding that drives our mission forward and builds the foundation for our ability to serve others.
Meanwhile, we are moving along on two other projects: the construction of our new model home/administrative offices, and our whole-house renovation. Pics below.
Looking ahead to Spring, we are closing in on finalizing the acquisition of properties that will keep us busy for the next handful of years. One is another whole house rehab, and two others are vacant land parcels that will support multiple homes built in small clusters. We are hopeful that each of these will be finalized before summer.
It will be transformational for us to be able to chart out the next half-decade or so with more clarity and certainty than has ever been the case. We have spent the last number of years scurrying like crabs trying to find parcels to build on, as the flow of donated land and rehabilitation projects all but stopped.
It will also be transformational for us to build multiple homes per year in one location. We have planned for and built the capacity to be able to do so over the past several years. We are ready. I believe that our communities are also ready to embrace the changes necessary to enable more housing to be built for those all but shut out of opportunities for home ownership.
“Chance favors the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur
“Luck is the residue of design.” - Branch Rickey
These nascent opportunities are noteworthy in that each of these have been made possible through collaboration. They would not have come into being by dint of our own effort alone. They are the result of tending and tilling relationships: with other community service organizations, donors and investors, municipal officials and other interested and active citizens. In some cases, the nurturing has taken years to flower. These opportunities are also the result of showing the proof of our vision: the innovation and quality of the homes we are building and the lives we are changing. And by speaking up and out about the perils of doing nothing.
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” - James Baldwin
In May, we will be showcasing all of that, as we host a community celebration at our own new home. We will be honoring and celebrating our past, present and future, and those who have collaborated to make change possible.
If you happen to be in the neighborhood, we’d love to see you.
dear al
i love seeing
your passionate collaborative vision
move ahead on all levels
i love that you invite all
to come celebrate
the fruits of your labors
and join in creating the next ones 🎉
Now that's a starter house!!!
It's much like the one that I grew up in - but which also had an attatched one car garage that you got to through it's separate back door, or it's stret oriented rectractable front door for the car -- just suggesting- and it waould make the home complete.
One comment -- in todays age and the younger population liking open interior space - you might consider lowering the height of the interior wall / partition separating the kitchen from the living area.
A grat job.
Now we just have to find more builders that will build them instead of the McMansions they call "starter" homes.